With the August 8 FBI raid on Donald Trump’s estate in Mar-a-Lago, the crisis of the American political system has reached an unprecedented stage. It is the most significant political action taken against Trump since he emerged as a national political figure in 2015.
Ten weeks before a national midterm election in which pro-Trump candidates are prominent on the Republican ticket, the Justice Department has determined that the interests of the Biden administration’s global grand strategy—centered on the escalation of the US confrontation with Russia and China—requires action against Trump at a level that goes far beyond its timid and indecisive response to his January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the results of the presidential election.
The documents taken by Trump to Mar-a-Lago concerned some of the most important information in the possession of the American military-intelligence apparatus. The American ruling class has developed elaborate procedures for safeguarding such state secrets, which are enforced ruthlessly.
Police direct traffic outside an entrance to former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Monday, Aug. 8, 2022, in Palm Beach, Fla. [AP Photo/Terry Renna] The Washington Post reported Thursday that the documents included “nuclear materials,” i.e., information about nuclear weapons, whether those of the United States, its allies, or some foreign adversary or target. This information is so sensitive that it is classified under special laws and cannot be declassified, even by a president, without adhering to rigorous requirements.
On Saturday, the Post reported that when Trump returned a first tranche of 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives in January, officials “realized some of the returned material was clearly classified, including highly sensitive signals intelligence—intercepted electronic communications such as emails and phone calls of foreign leaders.”
The itemized list of material seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago, released by a Florida court Friday, also included a folder labeled “Info re: President of France.” The secrets of Emmanuel Macron, derived from US electronic surveillance and/or high-level informants in the French government, could include everything from his personal life and financial dealings to back-channel communications with Vladimir Putin and French covert operations in North and Central Africa.
The warrant that authorized the FBI raid, made public Friday, was authorized personally by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a man of the state with decades of experience in handling the sensitive affairs of the ruling class. He supervised the prosecution of Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and former Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. From 1997 to 2021, Garland was a judge on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the most important federal appellate court which hears most cases involving national security. He became the court’s chief judge in 2013.
Garland’s warrant declared that federal prosecutors had probable cause to believe Trump may have engaged in conduct that violated the Espionage Act. Since its passage in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution and US imperialism’s entry into World War I, the American ruling class has invoked this act in matters of exceptional importance to the defense of the state. It was used in the jailing of socialist Eugene V. Debs for his opposition to World War I. It was used to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. It has also been invoked against Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, who exposed US war crimes, and most recently to demand the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
To have it invoked against the former “commander in chief” of the US military-intelligence apparatus is no small matter. It is an acknowledgment that Trump has continued to operate a state within a state under the mantra l’état, c’est moi (“The state, it’s me”). As Trump declared at the 2016 Republican National Convention, “I alone can fix it.”
Trump is no victim of an antidemocratic conspiracy. The president serves his term as an officer of the state, and he possesses no right to make use of the state’s secrets and records of its crimes for his own personal gain. It does not take a great deal of imagination to understand why Trump has kept this information: to utilize it in pursuit of his ongoing fascist political conspiracy, through blackmail and other means.
Unlike the investigation of January 6, there are no issues involving significant democratic rights in this case. There is a distinct difference in the aggressiveness with which the Justice Department and Biden administration have moved on this issue compared to its halting, ambivalent approach to the investigation and exposure of the first attempt in the history of the US to overthrow the government and establish a dictatorship. By pursuing Trump on the basis of state secrets, the Democrats will leave all the issues raised in January 6 unanswered and covered up.
However, these events expose what the real priorities of the ruling class are. The state cannot tolerate Trump’s disruption of its war effort. The Democrats’ appeal is to the military and repressive state apparatus, as it has been since Trump’s election. Biden’s strategy has always been to appeal to military brass and to “save” his “colleagues” in the Republican Party through an alliance based on imperialist bellicosity and “bipartisanship.”
The Democratic Party is hoping that the Republican Party will respond to the publication of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant and revelations about state secrets by backing away from Trump. The claims of Biden’s press secretary, who stated that the president knew nothing about the raids before they took place, can only mean that behind the scenes Biden is engaged in intense negotiations with the Republicans, not to secure agreement on opposing fascism but to protect the global operation of US imperialism.
Senior Republicans have disavowed the attacks on the FBI by fascistic figures like Representative Paul Gosar and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have urged measures to “defund” and even “destroy” the bureau. Speaking on Sunday television interview programs, top Republican officials toned down their attacks on the Mar-a-Lago raid, defended the FBI and suggested they needed more information from Garland about the national security issues involved.
Trump has responded by signaling that he is prepared to talk, a sign that he is nervous about a confrontation over these issues. In an interview with Fox News Monday, Trump issued a half-threat: “The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger, like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one—years of scams and witch hunts, and now this. If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that.”
The Justice Department and powerful sections of the judiciary are pressing forward with investigations and prosecutions against Trump and his immediate circle. The Mar-a-Lago raid took place on August 8. On August 10, the ex-president was hauled before a Manhattan grand jury where he took the Fifth Amendment 440 times during a deposition for the New York state investigation into the finances of the Trump Organization. On August 11-12 came the Garland press briefing and the release of the search warrant.
On August 15, a federal judge in Georgia ruled that Senator Lindsey Graham, a diehard Trump supporter, must testify before a local grand jury investigating Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials to overturn the 2020 election results. The same day, lawyers representing Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani announced that he would be required to appear in person before the Georgia grand jury.
The Biden administration and the Democratic Party have gone out of their way to avoid making a connection between the raid and the events of January 6, 2021. The Democrats have tried desperately to handle the faction fight with Trump behind the scenes, out of view of the American population, to minimize the risk of touching on any issue that would trigger popular discontent. The Democrats have always focused opposition to Trump on questions of the guardianship of imperialist foreign policy, as shown by their 2019 impeachment of Trump for temporarily halting US military aid to Ukraine.
The Biden administration today commands very little public support. It is facing electoral defeat in November which could put Trump’s supporters in charge of the House of Representatives, or even the entire Congress. Its war in Ukraine is stalemated, and its anti-Russia and anti-China campaigns have aroused no significant mass support. Most importantly, it faces rising discontent within the American and international working class over the slashing of living standards by inflation and the horrific, ever-increasing death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its primary aim is to forge ruling class unity to prosecute the war and crush opposition from below, with no surprises from the unpredictable Trump.
Removing Trump from the political scene will not halt the growing power of far-right tendencies within the capitalist two-party system, which is the product not of one man but of a rotten political system based on massive levels of inequality and permanent war. What is necessary is not only a political settlement with Trump, but with the entire capitalist system which produced him. This is only possible through mass action by the working class.
The warrant used in the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was unsealed Friday, revealing that the former president is being investigated by the Department of Justice (DoJ) for multiple crimes, including violating the Espionage Act, obstructing justice and destroying sensitive or classified government records.
Neither Trump nor any of his co-conspirators has been prosecuted, let alone jailed, for mobilizing a fascist mob to storm the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the election and seize dictatorial power.
The 1917 Espionage Act has typically been used against socialists and others deemed enemies of US imperialism, such as WikiLeaks founder and former editor Julian Assange.
That these historically unprecedented events occur within three months of a national election—accompanied by increasing incidents of fascist violence—which could hand control of Congress to Trump’s accomplices in the Republican Party, speaks to the growing instability of the entire political system.
The warrant and property receipt were unsealed after lawyers for Trump did not file an objection to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s motion on Thursday to unseal the document. Garland announced the motion when he made his first public comment on the FBI raid.
Attorney General Merrick Garland (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) Trump and his fascist allies responded to the FBI raid by immediately going on the offensive, denouncing the Biden administration for “weaponizing” the Justice Department and portraying the would-be dictator Trump as the defender of the Constitution. The entire party leadership came to his defense, and fascist militia elements linked to Trump and the GOP posted threats of violent attacks, including murder, against Garland, Judge Reinhart, FBI Director Christopher Wray and others.
This was facilitated by the insistence of President Joe Biden that he had no foreknowledge of the raid and had not been briefed by Garland since it was carried out. Biden has continued his extraordinary silence, having gone on vacation in South Carolina.
Using the absurd pretext of non-interference in the affairs of the Justice Department, Biden has failed to endorse the FBI raid or declare support for Garland, even in the wake of an attack on an FBI field office outside of Cincinnati by an armed pro-Trump fascist.
Both he and Garland have avoided the central issue behind the raid—its connection to the January 6 attempted coup and Trump’s ongoing efforts to mobilize his fascist followers, with the backing of the Republican Party, to overthrow the government and install himself as dictator.
Biden is thereby continuing his coverup of the coup and concealing from the American people what his government knows about the ongoing and escalating threat to their democratic rights. He is instead seeking to maintain his alliance with a section of the Republican Party in furtherance of war against Russia and war preparations against China.
On Friday morning, prior to the release of the warrant, the Washington Post reported that the documents sought by the DoJ included highly sensitive nuclear secrets. The Post cited as its source “people familiar with the investigation,” that is, Justice Department officials authorized to leak information to the media.
Trump denounced the report as a witch-hunt and hoax, linking it to the Mueller investigation into his alleged ties to Russia.
The unsealed warrant revealed that FBI agents had been permitted to search Trump’s office and any “storage rooms and all other rooms or areas within the premises ... in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate.”
M SNBC contributor and historian Michael Beschloss posted a tweet on Thursday evening recounting historical figures who had been executed for sharing U.S. nuclear secrets with foreign governments, and a former CIA chief shared the post with his own approving tweet.
Conservative commentator Jerry Dunleavy accused Beschloss of "suggesting that Trump should be executed," considering it was posted just after the Washington Post piece speculating that the FBI had raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to find missing nuclear documents.
The Washington Post exclusive from Thursday afternoon attempted to offer more details as to what the FBI was searching for at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, as Attorney General Merrick Garland remained tight-lipped about it in his address to the nation.
The report cited sources speaking "on the condition of anonymity," claiming, "Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation."
© James Devaney/GC Images Ex-CIA director and an MSNBC contributor suggest the execution of Former President Donald Trump after Washington Post claim that the FBI raid sought out "nuclear" documents. James Devaney/GC Images
FBI RAID ON TRUMP LATEST PROOF OF DEMOCRAT WAR ON RULE OF LAW
The claim sent shock waves through social media and became a top Twitter trend.
T his weekend, Florida governor Ron DeSantis delighted the crowd at a conference for the far-right group Turning Point Action by proclaiming that the FBI’s warrant to seize national-security documents stolen by Donald Trump was yet another double standard against law-abiding conservatives. “You look at the raid at Mar-a-Lago, and I’m just trying to remember — maybe somebody here can remind me — about when they did a search warrant at Hillary’s house when she had a rogue server at Chappaqua and she was laundering classified information,” he announced. “I don’t remember them doing that.”
© Intelligencer; Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images Intelligencer; Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Obviously, the weirdest thing about this trust heuristic is that it assumes the more credible party to this dispute is serial lawbreaker and pathological liar Donald Trump rather than the lifelong Republican he appointed to lead the agency. But the deeper and more twisted belief system being expressed by Trump’s allies is the premise that the FBI has engaged in a pattern of political bias against their party since the Clinton saga.
The truth is just the opposite: The FBI has often bent over backward to placate Republicans only to be met with distrust when its results fail to conform to their most paranoid fantasies.
Begin with DeSantis’s claim that the FBI never seized Hillary Clinton’s server: In fact, the FBI took it in August 2015. “The seizure of the server, along with electronic copies of its contents maintained by her private lawyer, is in connection with a criminal investigation into the mishandling of classified information,” gloated a National Review editorial at the time. “It is being dressed up by a reeling Clinton campaign as Hillary’s ‘voluntary’ surrender of the server in connection with a ‘security inquiry.’”
The fact that DeSantis has a false memory that the FBI somehow never bothered to take her server is itself revealing. Republicans spent a year baying at the FBI and demanding prosecution while agents on the inside of the organization leaked continuously to conservative media sources. “Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI,” reported The Guardian in 2016. “It’s clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton,” said then–FBI Director James Comey privately. The New York Times ’ James Stewart reported that the pressure and threats of additional leaks from right-wing bureau staff drove Comey to violate DOJ protocol by publicizing the Clinton investigation.
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Is anti-FBI rhetoric dangerous?
In 2016, the FBI made its investigation into Clinton public while keeping its investigation of Trump secret, a choice that very likely swung the razor-tight outcome. The mistreatment of Clinton was so blatant that Trump even used it as a pretext to fire Comey the next year. Yet Republicans have created an upside-down history in which Clinton was coddled and Trump smeared.
The Russia investigation, of course, has loomed large among Republican grievances. Trump claimed, and Republicans came to believe, that the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia was directed by Democrats to harm Trump’s campaign. Of course, such a scheme could work only if the FBI had leaked the investigation — instead, it leaked to the New York Times that Trump had “no clear ties to Russia.”
The Justice Department’s inspector general found the Russia investigation was properly predicated. Rejecting this finding, then–Attorney General William Barr appointed his own ally to produce evidence supporting Trump’s suspicion that a Democratic cabal originated the Russia probe, but that effort failed miserably .
Indeed, the Russia investigation itself was hamstrung by its conservative decisions. Robert Mueller confined the investigation to direct criminal charges rather than making it a broader investigation of the counterintelligence threat posed by Trump’s connections with Russia. He allowed Trump to submit evasive answers to questions in writing rather than testify and decided it would be unfair to Trump to state clearly that he had engaged in obstruction.
One lesson here is that Mueller’s understandable belief that he needed to maintain legitimacy with Republicans by bending over backward to demonstrate his fairness ultimately backfired. It allowed Trump and his allies to frame Mueller’s findings as proving “no collusion” — which Mueller did not say — and from there to paint the entire probe as a “witch hunt.”
You can see the same dynamic at work in the current investigation into Trump’s refusal to give back documents he illegally took. Trump’s supporters have held up the bureau’s patient accommodation in the face of Trump’s defiance as evidence it can’t be trusted. “Just to get this straight, we’re now supposed to believe that the material Trump had stored in his house was nuclear content so sensitive the FBI waited a year and a half to go get it and used the National Archives as a prop to do so?” sneers Ben Shapiro .
Should the Justice Department ultimately decline to charge Trump — which, barring anything deeply sensitive or incriminating in the documents, would seem to be the most likely outcome — conservatives will almost certainly register the FBI’s intervention as yet another case of persecution. The reality of the situation will be just the opposite: Trump openly flouting the law and getting away with it. But the alchemy of conservative paranoia will transmute it into more evidence of his innocence and yet another reason for them to rally to his side when he inevitably proceeds to his next crime.
The underlying cause of this pathological dynamic is a right-wing propaganda bubble that pumps conservatives full of rage, cordens them off from any information that would mitigate their sense of persecution, and primes them to be led by demagogues who feel free to act with impunity, knowing their base will stay loyal regardless. This dysfunction produced Trump’s rise in the first place. And now every new instance of Trump’s misconduct simply confirms to the Republican Party that he was right all along.
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